Critical Analysis of

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Critical Analysis of “War Photographer” by Carol Ann Duffy

In his darkroom he is finally alone

with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.

The only light is red and softly glows,

as though this were a church and he

a priest preparing to intone a Mass.

Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays

beneath his hands which did not tremble then

though seem to now. Rural England. Home again

to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,

to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet

of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger’s features

faintly start to twist before his eyes,

a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries

of this man’s wife, how he sought approval

without words to do what someone must

and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black-and-white

From which his editor will pick out five or six

for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick

with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.

From the aeroplane he stares impassively where

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he earns his living and they do not care.

Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. She grew up in Staffordshire and went to university in Liverpool. Having spent some time in London as a freelance writer, she now lives in Manchester. She has won many prizes and several awards for her poetry. Her poems, she says, ‘come from my everyday experience, my past/memory and my imagination. People and characters are fascinating to me’. Many of her poems are based on true experiences and real people. In the 1970s Carol Ann Duffy was friendly with ...

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